Vermont utility and Tesla making Powerwall battery available to homes, pretty cheap

In the latest installment of their interesting collaboration, Vermont’s Green Mountain Power and Tesla have announced a low price for home backup batteries ($15 per month) with the utility hoping to recoup the cost partly by linking all the batteries into a virtual power source via Tesla’s software.

The utility has calculated that using Tesla’s batteries and grid software — plus tapping the smart thermostats, smart water heaters, solar panels and other distributed resources it’s integrating in pilot projects today — will be cheaper than more typical capital improvements on the distribution system.

This is part of the promise of distributed energy (solar panels, mostly): That they allow the creation of a different sort of power grid, with production and energy storage distributed hither and yon over a two-way transmission system. A non-trivial change from the one-way, big-power-production grid we’ve grown to know and love.

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About Granite Geek

Dave Brooks has written a science/tech column since 1991 - yes, that long - and has written this blog since 2006, keeping an eye on topics of geekish interest in and around New Hampshire, from software to sea level rise, population dynamics to printing (3-D, of course). He moderates monthly Science Cafe NH discussions, beer in hand, and discusses the geek world regularly on New Hampshire Public Radio.

Brooks earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics but got lost on the way to the Ivory Tower and ended up in a newsroom. He has reported for newspapers from Tennessee to New England. Rummage through his bag of awards you'll find oddities like three Best Blog prizes from the New Hampshire Press Association and a Writer of the Year award from the N.H. Farm and Forest Bureau, of all places. He joined the Concord Monitor in 2015.